Guest Post: Is The CHP Restoring Some Of Its Mojo?
April 23, 2015 § 1 Comment
With the Turkish parliamentary election a little more than six weeks away – and being cognizant of the fact that I’ve been ignoring the Ottomans side of the blog in recent months – today’s guest post comes to you from Selim Koru, who is a research fellow at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV) in Ankara. He focuses on Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia, and his post delves into some of the policy changes the CHP has made in an effort to be more electorally competitive and cut into the AKP’s vote share in June. You can follow him on Twitter @SelimKoru
It is tempting to write the CHP campaign’s obituary before the June 7 elections. Turkey’s main opposition party has racked up one spectacular loss after another in the past two decades. It has been clinging to a bankrupt ideology, was consumed by internal squabbling, and blinded by a stubborn sense of entitlement that comes from being Turkey’s founding party. It survived on its core of ideological supporters, who are concentrated in big cities and the Western coast. In the absence of a viable opposition, the AK Party dominated the scene.
It appears however, that the CHP is now squinting into the light of electoral politics. Party leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu introduced his platform last weekend, and to the country’s surprise, his more than 70-minute speech was not focused on the threat of creeping Islamization, or corruption under AK Party rule. He talked mostly about economic policy. His party seems to have come up with an overall economic plan, then dissected its electorate into groups and targeted each one in offering some reasons to vote for the party. Retired people get holiday bonuses, young people get their credit card interests lowered, farmers get lower fuel prices, newlyweds get lower housing prices and family insurance (delivered to women’s bank accounts) and so on. In other words, planners and strategists at the CHP seem to have done something resembling their actual jobs. They have tried to go beyond their core of 20-25 percent of the electorate, and to convince the middle to vote for them. And they haven’t done that through ideological tricks, like posing for photos with headscarved women, but with actual policy proposals.
Of course this brings problems with it. The Minister of Finance joked the next day that if the CHP showed him how they were going to pay for their promises without exploding the budget, he would vote for them. His point was well received. Turkish politics has a history of big promises, and people haven’t forgotten. In 1991, Tansu Ciller promised every farmer a tractor; the Islamist Necmettin Erbakan was going to abolish interest rates across the board; Süleyman Demirel said everyone would have “three keys” – to a home, a car, and a workplace – and once, that he would give “five liras more than whatever anyone else is giving.” That is why Kılıçdaroğlu’s election promises summoned the specter of the 1990s, a time of dysfunctional coalitions governments and debts to the IMF, remembered today as imperialist overlords. The AK Party press of course, has lost no time to accuse Kılıçdaroğlu of “exhuming old Turkey.”
That means that Kılıçdaroğlu treads a narrow path. He needs to grab people’s attention with ambitious promises, but remain credible. So far, things have been a little shaky. CHP spokesmen have said that the money for their election promises was there, but that the AK Party’s corruption kept it off the books. Kılıçdaroğlu himself has tried to reassure people by reminding them of his past as a star bureaucrat at the Ministry of Finance, where he managed the social security budget. He has been uncharacteristically confident on fiscal matters, recently responding to the Finance Minister’s comments by saying that “he doesn’t know how taxes are collected, I do.” He will have to stay on the offensive in the run-up to June 7.
The party leader is getting help from an eclectic team. He has chosen an unusual number of new parliamentary candidates, which should enliven the party’s base. The CHP leadership has also been fed polls and ideas by the Benenson Strategy Group, an American firm that has worked for Obama and is said to be working with the 2016 Clinton campaign. The real firepower however, comes from Ali Taran, whose advertising firm is known for its role in the rise of the “Genç Party” (Youth Party), which was founded right before its first and last elections in 2002. The party is infamous for having raised its vote from zero to 7.25 by making promises like free textbooks, or fixing the price of diesel gas to one lira. The CHP should not abandon responsibility, but it could well benefit from that kind of skill to liven up its base.
In the end, however, the CHP will have to pick off disillusioned AK Party voters if it wants to improve on its recent underwhelming performance, which should be possible in this election. Polls place the AK Party vote around the low 40th percentile, which is lower than usual. The party has lost much appeal in the past year, as even senior members have been chafing under President Erdoğan’s domineering presence. On the other hand, the AK Party continues to have by far the best grassroots organization and a superb communication strategy. Erdoğan has developed a grand narrative of Turkey as a rising regional power, which makes him impervious to external shocks. A slowing economy can be chalked up to the “interest lobby” and corruption allegations are mere “tricks of the parallel state.”
Kılıçdaroğlu will have to pierce that fog of inevitability and convince people that his party is a viable alternative. Given recent history, nobody should expect miracles. If his team stays focused, they might manage to move their vote a bit closer to 30 percent. Depending on how the CHP and other opposition parties perform, we might be looking at a coalition government come June. That could freshen up government, or it could bring back the paralysis of the 1990s. Whatever happens, a little political competition after a long rut is welcome.
Checking In On The Turkish PM Race
June 3, 2014 § 9 Comments
Despite my instincts that Prime Minister Erdoğan was going to decide that it is better to be a super-empowered prime minister than the Turkish president under the current constitutional configuration, it seems pretty clear at this point that he has his sights trained on the Çankaya Palace. The AKP has officially announced that it is not going to change its internal party regulations to allow MPs who have served three terms to run for a fourth, which means that Erdoğan will be term limited out and will thus seek the presidency. There is no doubt that Erdoğan will win and become the first directly elected Turkish president, and there is also little doubt that he will transform the presidency as he sees fit from a traditionally apolitical office with few real powers into something far different. The more interesting question that remains is who will replace Erdoğan as prime minister, and the answer to that is a lot murkier.
Due to the AKP’s three-terms-and-out rule, 73 AKP parliamentarians are unable to stand for election again and the list is a rundown of nearly all of the party heavyweights. Bülent Arınç, Bekir Bozdağ, Ali Babacan, Ömer Çelik, etc. The A team, that founded the party and shepherded it through three consecutive electoral victories, is out, and that leaves precious few suitable candidates to replace Erdoğan. It will have to be someone who has some modicum of name recognition and influence, but also someone whom Erdoğan can control. To the best of my calculations, there are two people who fit the bill and who are not subject to the term limit conundrum.
The first, and most obvious one, is Ahmet Davutoğlu. There is no question that he has a burning ambition to move on to bigger and better things, and his standing as a candidate for election in 2011 – after being appointed foreign minister despite not being a member of the Grand National Assembly – was a signal that he knew he would need to be more involved politically if he hoped to replace his patron. In many ways, Davutoğlu is the ego (in more ways than one) to Erdoğan’s id, tamping down some of the prime minister’s more rash instincts and never failing to parrot what Erdoğan is saying but putting it in a more favorable light. Whatever the level of outrageousness that Erdoğan is spouting, Davutoğlu always has a ready explanation for what the prime minister actually meant, and he has also shown a willingness to play the attack dog and go on the offensive. Like the prime minister, he always has a scolding lecture handy for those who challenge him. Because he is more reserved and far less willing to reveal whatever he happens to be thinking at any given moment though, Davutoğlu is in some ways more predictable that Erdoğan but in other ways less so, and he is similar to Abdullah Gül in that he plays better with foreign audiences. I once sat through a Davutoğlu lecture at Georgetown where he was at his most charming and dissembling best, and by the end the dean of the School of Foreign Service had literally offered him a position as a professor whenever he was ready to leave the Foreign Ministry. The downside to Erdoğan handing the reins to Davutoğlu is that he might be too ambitious; while he has never publicly displayed any willingness to challenge Erdoğan in any way and has been nothing but the loyal servant, he might very well act differently once prime minister and be less willing to defer to Erdoğan on any and all subjects.
The other plausible candidate is Numan Kurtulmuş, who is far less known to those outside of Turkey. Kurtulmuş and Erdoğan rose up together through the ranks of the Fazilet Party, but split after Fazilet was banned by the Constitutional Court and dissolved, with Kurtulmuş joining with the hardliners to found Saadet and Erdoğan going on to found the AKP. After he was ousted from Saadet, Kurtulmuş formed the HSP – known colloquially as HAS, meaning pure – and then merged HAS with the AKP in July 2012. Unlike Davutoğlu, Kurtulmuş has the street cred that comes from having been part of the crowd around Necmettin Erbakan and the old Islamist parties, and he has a devoted following among Turkish religious conservatives. When the AKP absorbed HAS two years ago, I wrote the following:
There is speculation that the reason Erdoğan has now invited HAS into the fold has to do more with Kurtulmuş than with HAS itself. As he announced yesterday,Erdoğan is only going to run as AKP leader one more time, which means that he needs a way to remain as the dominant figure within his party. While everyone anticipates that the new constitution spearheaded by the AKP will transform Turkey into a presidential system and that Erdoğan will run to be Turkey’s first newly powerful president, that does not mean that his path forward is completely clear. Should Turkey’s current president, Abdullah Gül, make a bid to be PM, then Erdoğan will have a serious and credible rival standing opposite him within his own party. Gül is a popular politician, a serious thinker, and less divisive than Erdoğan, and it is unclear that a President Erdoğan would be able to dominate a Prime Minister Gül. Kurtulmuş, on the other hand, is another story. He is exactly the type of PM that a President Erdoğan would want, since he is pliable and less likely to seek to carve out an independent power base from which to challenge Erdoğan. In fact, when the HAS Party was formed, some of its members were concerned that Kurtulmuş was not tough enough and that his lack of an “authoritarian mentality” would be a weakness compared to the leaders of other parties. Should HAS merge with the AKP, and all signs so far point to this happening, look for Kurtulmuş to slowly emerge as Erdoğan’s favored candidate to replace him as PM.
I don’t think that Gül is going to try and become prime minister, but the rest of the analysis still holds true. Kurtulmuş seems like precisely the type of PM that Erdoğan could manipulate as president, and who would not protest once Erdoğan begins to expand the powers of his new office and infringe upon the prerogatives that belong to his old office. The question is whether Erdoğan actually trusts Kurtulmuş after their years apart, and to that I have no answer. With the presidential race not in doubt though, how the prime ministry shapes up is what all of those interested in the inside baseball of Turkish politics will be watching as the summer progresses.
Coup Country
April 16, 2012 § Leave a comment
Following the arrest of the generals involved in the 1997 “post-modern coup” that toppled Necemttin Erbakan’s government and outlawed his Refah Party, Erdoğan yesterday declared the era of military coups over and said that Turkey is no longer a “coup country.” While this appears to be a dangerous prediction given Turkey’s history, the purging of generals and the prosecution of officers as part of the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer investigations, along with the trials for the September 12 and February 28 coup plotters, means that Erdoğan is probably right. The military is no longer in a position to overthrow the government and was badly exposed when it tried unsuccessfully to intimidate the AKP from appointing Abdullah Gül as president, and the various reprisals it has suffered over the past few years are going to have the intended effect of keeping the officers in their barracks.
Few people will argue that this is a bad thing. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, civilian control of the military is a hallmark of democracy and Turkey has finally established true vertical accountability. At the same time, Erdoğan must not use his newfound unfettered power to create a different type of problem for Turkey’s democracy. While military interference in democratic politics is a bad thing, so is using democratic institutions to advance creeping authoritarianism. Worrisome signs abound, including the fact that the investigations into the military have been trumped up and relied on forged documents, and opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has denounced the recent arrest of the February 28 generals as motivated by a desire for revenge. After all, Erdoğan was a Refah member and a disciple of Erbakan, and the harsher restrictions placed on public displays of religion following the coup must have rankled Erdoğan personally. Now that the military is out of the picture as a constraint – and Erdoğan’s declaration of Turkey being coup proof indicates that he himself now feels that his freedom of movement is unrestrained by the army – it is crucial that the temptation of bending the rules to make the AKP a permanent ruling party is avoided. Turkey has made great strides in some areas, such as empowering the ability of Turks to participate in democratic politics with an increased voice on constitutional issues, and now that the structural constraint of military oversight is gone, it will be an encouraging sign for Turkey’s democratic future if the government does not now overreach and crack down further on groups that present challenges to its rule, real or perceived.
